Professors To Be Honored For Study Of Traffic Stop Disparities
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Three professors from the University of Kansas were scheduled to be in Chicago on Saturday, to receive an award for their book on the racial disparities in police stops across the nation.
Dr. Steven Maynard-Moody, director of the institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas, said he and his fellow researchers found no racial bias in normal traffic stops -- in which the sole reason a driver is pulled over is an actual traffic violation -- but they did find tremendous bias in so-called "investigatory traffic stops."
"An investigatory stop is usually based on some pretext of a traffic violation, but instead of going 15 miles an hour over the speed limit, maybe you're going 2 miles an hour over the speed limit. Or in one famous case, you paused too long at a stop sign," he said.
Maynard-Moody authored a study called "Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race And Citizenship," which found even though investigatory stops reveal more criminal behavior by non-black motorists by percentage of those stopped, African-American drivers were more likely to be the targets of such stops.
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The study found similar results to a U.S. Justice Department investigation of the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, which was the focus of national attention for weeks last year, after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man, who some witnesses said was surrendering when he was slain.
The Justice Department's report described Ferguson as having a racially biased police department and justice system; after finding patterns of racial profiling, bigotry, and profit-driven law enforcement and court practices in the small Missouri town where two-thirds of the 21,000 residents are black, but most police officers and city officials are white.
"If nothing else, the tragedies like Ferguson – and it's amazing to me that the conversation as continued this long – that maybe we're beginning to look at something that we haven't looked at as closely as we should for too long," Maynard-Moody said.
He and fellow KU professors Charles Epp and Don Haider-Markel have been honored with the 2015 Best Book Award from the Section on Public Administration Research at the American Society for Public Administration.
They'll formally accept the award Saturday at the ASPA conference at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
